


The Distance is Futile

by angeloncewas



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: BAMF Niki | Nihachu, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Found Family, Gen, I change details for story's sake, Niki | Nihachu-centric, Realistic Minecraft, Sleepy Bois Inc as Family, They/Them Pronouns for Eret (Video Blogging RPF), Wanderlust, mostly canon-compliant, no beta we die like jonald, references to niki beats hardcore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28419792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeloncewas/pseuds/angeloncewas
Summary: fam·i·ly/ˈfam(ə)lē/1. a group of one or more parents and their children living together as a unit.2. a group of people united in criminal activity.3. a group of related things.-“Family doesn’t do this,” Niki whispers.“Mine does,” Technoblade replies.
Relationships: Floris | Fundy & Niki | Nihachu, No Romantic Relationship(s), Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson
Comments: 27
Kudos: 256





	The Distance is Futile

Niki has never lived so far outside the ordinary. 

She grows up in a quiet home in a peaceful world, her parents’ doting gazes following her down to the flower fields. She learns how to bake, how to play guitar, how to stand up to boys who act as though she’s something less than them. 

_It’s there that the problem starts,_ or so her mother will say later. Their words don’t roll off her back, slick raindrops against a shut window; she lets them in, adds them to the growing pit in her body that pools and threatens to seep out of her skin.

As she grows, the familiar meadows no longer seem so expansive, her wooden floor something akin to splinters in her feet. Comforts begin to feel suffocating. Niki is a buried flower bud; she knows exactly what it is she is meant to become. In that way, she knows that her world is too small to contain her.

At 16 she bids her parents goodbye, tucking her communicator down under her shirtsleeve and deafening herself to their protests. She’s a wanderer in the making, not the strongest or most well-read, and surely not the loudest, but the sense of adventure is in her bones. She bleeds amber sunsets and carries lonely mornings behind her eyes; she loves her parents and knows they love her, but she cannot stay in their little cottage home. She needs more than peace and tranquil water.

At 17 she slays an Ender dragon for the first time, hundreds of worlds away from home. It cracks in the sky as she watches and the triumph feels like a burn against her skin, like a fire in her lungs that creeps up her throat. She misses her parents, tells them that she’s done it before anyone else and their answering congratulations make it feel more like a victory than the beast’s final cry.

At 18, her communicator blips a message from someone she’d encountered some 30 worlds ago. A guy who'd suggested she let him accompany her in exchange for his protection, a proposition Niki hadn’t quite known how to handle. You don’t become a world-hopper without some capability, and she’d told him so, but his apologetic smile had answered; the deal was for his sake, not hers. They’d almost made it to the dragon together, but not quite.

Wilbur Soot tells her _“I have an invitation for you,”_ and she wonders if it’s time to finally leave this cycle, where every new biome she enters feels like an echo of the past. She’s sieged bastions and fought ghasts with her bare hands, but this new world, the “Dream SMP,” it’s called, is sure to have something unique to offer her.

So Niki packs up her minimal possessions and heads out, a message to her parents that she’s sure her mother will appreciate, _“I might be settling down a bit,”_ sent along the way. Niki feels as though she’s conquered the worlds she can reach, but there’s more to do, more to see, and a man who thought to reach out to her, despite once confessing that he’s not good at talking about personal things ( _ironic,_ she’d thought at the time, the two of them little more than strangers), waiting.

What she told her parents turns out to be a lie, though she hadn’t meant it as one. She’s greeted at her new world, one firmly out of her control this time, by the open arms and wide smile of Wilbur. A boy stands to his left, introduced as _Tommy,_ and as they tuck a uniform into her arms, she doesn’t mention how he looks too young to be assisting Wilbur in what she quickly learns is a full-scale war.

Niki might feel deceived if she was anyone else. There was no indicator that battle lay along the path Wilbur had offered, unless she was supposed to have read the plea between _“Remember me?”_ and _“I think you’d like it here.”_

Niki isn’t anyone else though, and this twist of fate or product of half-truths is a new adventure she’s ready to embark on. She watches Wilbur’s hands reach towards his weapon and then withdraw as they hurry towards land that he trusts. She hears the grit behind Tommy’s boundless enthusiasm and sees the way he stops for a second to shiver as they pass a person Wilbur tells her she’s meant to hate.

Eret nods as they walk by, their crown slightly skewed and their expression obscured behind sunglasses. There’s something in their demeanor that makes her want to know more, but between Tommy’s sudden unease and Wilbur’s rapid-fire recap of a story of treachery and desperation and power, Niki doesn’t have time to analyze it.

* * *

L’manberg is a haphazard country, just like its people; a collection of almost-fulfilled promises and beauty ravaged by war.

Niki decides to set up a bakery, her mining-torn hands finding the handle of the spoon like a memory. She folds cake batter over onto itself at the ease at which she’s learned to sift through gravel and offers goods to the weary few under her friend’s command.

It’s a morning like that- not too long after she opens her doors, something big and unspoken looming on the horizon- when she finds out Wilbur and Tommy are more than just allies.

“You’re his brother?” she asks incredulously.

Niki doesn’t startle easily. Traveling across worlds where monsters are constantly sneaking up on you changes how you react to things. Tommy’s passing comment- a joke about how awful their family is at waking up early- manages to surprise her though. She's never even considered the possibility that Wilbur has a sibling. 

_Maybe he really is bad at talking about personal things,_ she thinks, re-evaluating her judgement of this man, who’s brought her into a world he’s determined to create within another.

Tommy answers, his mouth half-full of pastry in a way that makes Niki wince and turn away. “Yeah. Him and Phil took me in when I was younger.” His smile grows wicked as she hands him a napkin and silently begs him to use it. “Called me a gremlin child ‘cause I was always fighting ‘em.”

Niki laughs. “That sounds like something you would do.” 

She’s not sure who Phil is, but it does, really. Niki has been told all about how the war started, about Tommy and Tubbo, the two teenagers who dared to defy the creator of this world. Wilbur has a plan, but they’re the ones who’ve somehow managed to obtain some sort of power.

None of it makes complete sense and she knows she’s landed herself on the side of the underdogs, but Niki doesn’t mind. She’s never been one to want to play things the easy way.

She gives him more pastries- _“For your brother,”_ she winks- and watches the boy leave. His armor looks oddly sized and his bow bumps against his hip as he runs down the wooden path back to his family. Despite herself, she can’t help but hope that Wilbur actually knows what he’s doing.

* * *

A fox she’s seen around, usually at Wilbur’s heels, approaches her after the election has been announced, just as she’s wiping down her front counter and getting ready to close up for the night. 

She’s not too worried about the election itself per se; Wilbur has the votes almost guaranteed. There’s just something about the confidence that’s been sitting in his gaze lately that unsettles her, something unfamiliar and metallic in every grand gesture.

He’d offered her iron boots, way back when, not charged into battle as though nothing could kill him. She’s not sure what he would do if they met for the first time, now.

The fox, who her brain recalls as “Fundy,” seems tense, his limbs wound up like he’s been cornered, even though he’s the one who’s just walked through her front door. She silently offers him a cookie, which he takes and holds tightly in both hands.

“Do you want to run for office with me?” he asks abruptly.

The question catches her off-guard. Fundy’s political aspirations are out of left field for her, especially with the proposal that she aid him in reaching them. Niki knows she’s not the ideal running mate; she’s not sure if she _wants_ to hold that kind of power, much less if she’d be good at it.

On the other hand, this is the first time anyone’s asked her to do anything important. The most she’s contributed to this war is breakfast foods and standing in her uniform for pictures. It’s like they’ve forgotten what she did before she came here and the stagnancy makes her bones itch.

Niki answers carefully. “Do you have something against Wilbur?” 

She needs to know if this is a betrayal or an adventure, she won’t partake in the former.

Fundy’s tail swishes and emotions flicker across his face and she’s reminded for a second of the way Eret’s chin dropped as she walked by with the people they betrayed.

Things aren’t black-and-white in this world, it’s not her against monsters anymore. It’s people, they’re all people. People with complexities and networks of roots interlocking so tightly and so deep she’ll probably never see them all, even if she works at it for her whole life.

“It’s complicated,” Fundy sighs. “I love him, of course, he’s my father, but-”

He stops as he catches the look on her face she isn’t able to hide fast enough, before settling himself properly on one of the barstools across from her. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” Niki admits.

“How long have you known Wilbur?”

“Um, a long time? I met him before this all started.”

Fundy nods and curls his tail around onto his lap, nibbling at the edge of the cookie as his whiskers twitch. It’s weird, watching this hybrid of human and animal eat her baking, but she’s seen weirder, and his hesitance makes her feel almost fond.

“That would explain it,” he replies. “I was born in L’manberg.”

Niki has far too many questions then, all of which she’s sure would be impolite to ask. There’s no social code of conduct for _“Are you old enough to be out alone at night?”_ and _“How are you a fox?”_ so she bites her tongue and asks him what the plan is, smiling as his ears perk up and his eyes gleam with joy.

She goes to bed that night with a political party: a campaign to organize and probably a friend to pacify, once Wilbur catches wind of it.

More importantly, however, she’s made an ally, someone who she’s fairly confident understands her motives for agreeing and has motives of his own, almost entirely unrelated to actually wielding power.

 _We’re both tired,_ she thinks, _of waiting._

Niki’s seen how Fundy watches Tommy and Wilbur, moves out of the way at one's insistence that they’re supposed to stand next to the other. She doesn’t know the history, the nuances, the secrets that lie deep underground with broken armor and rotten flesh, but she can recognize the apprehension in Fundy’s eyes. He wants more than his father is giving him, or at least a piece of what Wilbur’s been handing out to others.

It’s more boredom than glory that drives Niki. She has no illusions of victory after all, unlike the bit of hope she sees resting under Fundy’s fur.

Regardless, no matter what, Wilbur will have to notice Fundy when his name is on the ballot next to his own and Niki herself will finally _be somewhere_ in this still-unfamiliar environment, other than trapped under heaps of flour and the march of her weapon-wielding customers.

* * *

The flower fields on the Dream SMP are nowhere near as sprawling as that of her home world, just little pockets of blooming poppies tucked into corners, but they still manage to make her nostalgic for what she’s left behind.

She watches Tubbo, who’d caught wind of her excursion plans and asked to accompany her, bob his head in time with a bee that buzzes past and she can’t stifle her smile.

Tommy is an incredible person, all courage and anger wrapped up into wry limbs, but he’s clearly Wilbur’s man because of it. He comes in and leaves like a tornado warning.

Tubbo is more her speed, more of a steady summer downpour. He comes to sit in her bakery in the early morning sometimes, and they watch the sunrise together over warm scones.

“Do you like it here?” she asks him, on a whim.

“Yeah! The bees are cute.”

“No,” Niki laughs, “I’m glad. But I meant this world, the Dream SMP.”

“Hmm,” Tubbo frowns, pulling up some grass and letting it cascade back down onto the dirt before lying down next to her so that they’re both looking at the cerulean sky. “It’s my home, it’s not good or bad, it just is. I don’t know anything else, really”

Niki can’t help but feel intrigued. “How did you get here?”

“Oh, I followed Tommy. Philza said if we were leaving we should stick together.”

“Philza… Phil? Tommy and Wilbur’s dad?”

Tubbo flaps his feet and makes a noise of assent. “I was staying in his world before this. He says he found me on the side of the road, but I don’t really remember it.”

“O-oh.” Niki isn’t quite sure what to say to that, to this boy who has apparently hardly known anything other than war. She knows he’s a bit older than Tommy and that he adopts characters as second skins, but she never expected a tumultuous past to be behind him.

The more time she spends around people in this world, the more they throw her off-balance. “Are you their brother too, then?”

“I don’t know. Probably not, I’m just sort of Tommy’s friend. I mean, I’ve never even met Technoblade.”

 _Technoblade_. The name sounds like it should come with a tremble in the ground and a flock of ravens flying overhead. Niki, frankly, is almost afraid to find out what part of this increasingly massive family _Technoblade_ is. 

“Who- Who’s that?”

“Oh!” Tubbo claps his hands together. “Techno is Tommy and Wilbur’s brother,” he drops his voice to a whisper. “Don’t tell them, but I think he’s Philza’s favorite.”

Niki lets out a dramatic sigh and flops her hand over her forehead. “Philza, Wilbur, Fundy, Technoblade, Tommy, you. Is that all the family members I should know?”

“I think so. There’s some... strange rumors about Fundy’s mom, but they’re not really important.”

Something in his tone makes Niki trust his judgment, deciding to steer clear of the topic. She’s seen many things, but a man only just older than her having a politically-charged fox son with some sort of inferiority complex might just take the cake on new experiences; where he came from is probably the least of her worries.

“So you’ve never met him?” she inquires, setting the conversation back on course.

“Yeah. Tommy says he’s always off doing his own thing.” Another bee buzzes overhead and Tubbo follows it with his finger. “He sounds nice though, Wil said Techno was who taught him how to fight.”

Niki thinks of Wilbur, once clad carefully in head-to-toe armor, shield at the ready and caution in his step, now equipped only with a sword and an expansive vocabulary, a cockiness in the speeches he delivers to allies and enemies alike.

 _Technoblade taught him,_ she muses, wondering which version of him Tubbo’s talking about and if she’ll find out for herself.

He might be the last piece of this weird puzzle she’s stumbled into; an interpersonal affair that she’d thought was simply a matter of land and revolution at first. It all feels a little too private to be settled in fires and theft and in battle, but she keeps that thought tucked into her back pocket.

Niki sends off a message of love to her parents through the worn communicator around her wrist before sitting up and attempting to make a flower crown, Tubbo giggling at the way the petals fall onto her lap in a heap.

* * *

Fundy and Niki don’t win the election, just as she expected. Coconut2020 only gets 9% of the popular vote and she smiles what she hopes is a gracious smile while patting Fundy’s shoulder and watching the competition carefully. One of the main people involved, George, never showed up, and his running mate Quackity keeps shooting looks at the last-minute candidate Schlatt.

What Niki doesn’t see coming is Wilbur’s subsequent loss. The announcement of the result makes her breath legitimately catch as she feels Fundy’s small twitches of movement still completely.

Schlatt, of all people, wins, and that’s where all the problems start, or get worse, depending on how you look at it.

One of the first things Niki noticed about the Dream SMP in particular is how conflicts are handled. Steeped in a careful sort of sanity, an edge of complete destruction curbed by the way they lie and cheat and steal and burn down any offending structure that happens to pop up in their path.

This change, brought on by a man with curled horns who has no interest in respecting the unspoken rules, rubs salt into old wounds, awakens a virus that’s been lying dormant.

Schlatt’s first act is to exile Tommy and Wilbur and the entire concept of that doesn’t quite click in her brain. L’manberg is _their country,_ a product of their blood, of their successes and failures. They sang to the land before it was anything other than unused space in the greater SMP, just housing a man and his brother, filled to the brim with dreams.

Niki’s not sure how it can be L’manberg at all without them.

Several days later, the air is still and the country is asleep when Niki comes across something she’s sure she wasn’t supposed to; King Eret, of the land she’s never considered part of her home- Eret the Traitor, according to Wilbur- speaking to Fundy in hushed tones.

Fundy confesses to Eret that he has a plan to take down the renamed _“Manberg”_ from the inside, something that will only work if Schlatt has complete trust in him.

“It’s chess,” Fundy tells them, “and I intend to become the queen.”

“The strongest piece on the board then,” Eret says, approvingly.

The two walk back towards Eret’s castle together and Niki turns and runs up towards Tommy’s vacation home, the empty cabin she’s made her temporary shelter.

Her heart’s pounding a bit too loudly by the end of the journey; she’s fallen out of practice with this sort of thing. Niki’s mornings used to be gathering up her supplies and dodging burning zombies to the next notable landmark, but for a while they’ve been nothing but stovetops and sweets.

The queen _is_ the strongest on the board, seated beside the king and able to move however far the player should choose in any direction.

Niki can’t help but wonder if Fundy’s forgetting or purposefully omitting the central basis of a chess game: the queen exists to serve the king. The queen is nothing on its own, it has no purpose.

Niki gets to see a move across the board in action the next day. The L’manbergian flag paints the sky red and grey as it burns, a flaming torch clutched in Fundy’s right hand and his ears pressed flat against his head.

 _Queen’s Gambit,_ Niki thinks, watching tendrils of her friends’ legacy float away in wisps and then blacken and crumble to the ground as ash. _A risk taken to gain an advantage._

To give credit where credit is due, it works. Schlatt promotes Fundy after the fox renounces “L’manberg” as anything other than the place he was born and Wilbur’s gasp is the only thing that cuts through the stacked wall of silence. All players are nose-deep in the game; Fundy has created the perfect setup for the opponent's king to be taken.

The only question is who his opposition will be.

The easy answer is Schlatt, of course, what with Wilbur, Fundy’s father, relying on _Tubbo_ of all people to spy for his side. The boy is a diligent worker and a loyal friend, but he’s hardly the sly, secretive sort. She knows what Wilbur doesn’t, that Fundy hasn’t turned his back on his family, he has a plan that’s been set in motion.

There’s just something about the swish of his tail and the gleam in his eye that worries her.

Fundy looks at Schlatt with admiration, with awe, with something akin to hope. It’d be easy to dismiss it as part of the role he’s set out to fill, but Niki can’t be sure. Not when she knows Wilbur has hardly ever sent genuine praise in a direction other than towards Tommy; not when she remembers the glimmer in Fundy’s eyes as he talked about the possibility of _finally_ being acknowledged by his father at the election.

Wilbur let him down _again_ that day, too preoccupied with his own fate. Schlatt hasn’t done the same, he’s lifted Fundy up, in fact. Given him a government position, title and all, while his father spoke over his thanks and announced that he’s too young for that kind of responsibility.

It’s not much, but it’s enough for Niki to wonder if Fundy will end up playing the game for a different team than when he started.

* * *

Before she knows it, it’s the Festival, an event with too much buildup to be for nothing. Standing in the crowd, listening to the double meanings in every word Schlatt utters, Niki realizes she’s been looking at the wrong pieces all along. The queen doesn’t need her help, he won’t accept it anyway. Fundy is on his own journey and where he will arrive is entirely up to him. 

It’s the complete other side; a pawn, maybe, and his accompanying knight, who sit cornered, backed up against the wooden edge of the board.

It’s Tubbo and a pig, a being who answered to that name Tubbo uttered offhandedly not so long ago.

It’s Tubbo and _Technoblade,_ standing on the podium, the former trapped in a concrete box while the latter draws his cloak tighter.

Her throat feels raw from screaming, from pleading with Technoblade as loud as she can muster to save Tubbo from having to face death. Schlatt’s looking down at her with his lip curled and any sort of cover she’s maintained is blown, but she doesn’t care, begging the universe to let one of her cries make it to the pig’s ears.

No one’s listening, but she has to try, she has to do more than what everyone else is doing. Because who’s going to stand up for Tubbo?

Not Technoblade, whom Tubbo had spoken of fondly despite only knowing him through stories, whose crossbow is pointed between Tubbo’s eyes.

Not Wilbur, the self-appointed leader of Tubbo’s side, standing silently on the roof across from the podium, the worn trench coat he’s swapped his uniform out for billowing behind him.

 _Tommy would try and do something if Wilbur wasn’t holding him back,_ Niki thinks. He could still try and fight off his brother’s grip on his sleeve, but the terror in his face reminds her that he’s even younger than Tubbo is.

Niki can remember being 16, confident that the worlds beyond hers would offer her everything, would calm the storm in her own stomach. She can remember the first skeleton she’d slain on her own and the sound of its limbs crumbling to the ground. She can remember knowing nothing about anything and expecting it all to bend to her will anyway.

Tommy’s world has bent in the opposite direction and she, for a second, wishes that these teenagers had been a little more cowardly, had made themselves a world of their own in peace instead of war, hadn’t been so quick to follow in the footsteps of a man who’s _still smiling,_ even as Technoblade takes a deep breath and apologizes to Tubbo so quietly the microphone almost doesn’t pick it up.

Something in her shatters as the fireworks explode, Tubbo’s death marked down on her communicator. He’ll respawn, she knows, but she also knows what a death feels like; the emptiness it settles a little further into your bones.

She’s screaming again. Niki can hear her own voice, but it doesn’t register as coming out of her mouth anymore. She just wants someone to _do something_ instead of standing in stupid silence, having just watched a kid get shot.

She came to the Dream SMP on an adventurer’s whim and a message that told her nothing. 

_She doesn’t even want to be here._

“You want out of this country, you can fucking have it.”

Schlatt speaks down to her like the boys in the village used to, all vitriol and undisguised contempt. The man says he’s done with her, sees a shrill girl shouting nonsense at the most powerful person in the country, but it’s that exact moment she tucks L’manberg into a box in her memory, packs it up and prepares to move on.

“But where am I supposed to go?” she asks out loud, letting her voice break. 

Niki is not a revolutionary, she never has been. She’s a wanderer. She knows how to leave a place and never return.

Niki’s not actually asking her question and she doesn’t expect an answer, she just wants the tension to stay taut so that Schlatt won’t notice Tommy. Brave Tommy, escaping on the fringes of her vision, frantically dragging back a disoriented looking Tubbo, his grip so tight she can see the white of his knuckles from where she stands.

Wilbur saunters up slowly, just as Tommy disappears over the furthest hill, and it causes something bitter to rise in Niki’s throat. 

_Too little, too late,_ her mind supplies, just as he shouts up to the podium.

“You actually murdered Tubbo.”

“You actually let him do that,” Schlatt returns.

Niki realizes then that there’s something here she didn’t know about, a scheme stretching so far, its linchpins cracked under the pressure. She can’t tell whose it was though, or who was supposed to be involved.

Wilbur says something about Schlatt killing him, instead of anybody else, but it’s so stupid Niki almost wants to laugh along with the president.

It’s too late for heroic declarations. Wilbur let his friend- his almost-brother, his brother’s best friend, a teenager under his command- die. He let Tubbo die. It’s irreversible now.

* * *

Technoblade was terrifying at the Festival, but he’s even more so up close.

Tommy had referred to him as _“The Blade,”_ once, and Niki thought he was being his usual over-enthusiastic self, but it’s a fairly fitting name. The pig’s snout reveals a set of gleaming canines, and his arm muscles stretch and pull as he swings his sword with ease and parries an invisible target.

Pogtopia is a lonely place, a deep cavern with little more than Technoblade’s carefully kept potato crops, an endless array of unexplained buttons, and some meager attempts at decoration.

Niki spends most of her time travelling the edges of known SMP territory, her father’s small talk flashing up on her communicator while the wind ruffles her hair. She’s trying to avoid the burden of her own fears, as well as an increasingly erratic Wilbur. 

He worries her more and more as time goes on. He worries everyone, she suspects. Tommy and Tubbo are allied beyond whatever decisions Wilbur will make on his own, but even Technoblade watches him in a way that contrasts his disregard for everyone else.

Niki catches Technoblade building railing down the stairwell into Pogtopia’s center one day, muttering something about how Wilbur always looks like he’s about to fall.

She almost thanks him then, almost succumbs to the same atmosphere everyone else has fallen victim to. The lull of monotonous days and dreary, cold nights. The way Tubbo had insisted postmortem that they have to look at the big picture, that what’s done is done and things can just move on.

The sharp stone of the ravine digs into her legs as she swings them over the side and watches Technoblade put resources in their place. He walks the pathway of Pogtopia without weight on his shoulders; if she is Atlas, he is one of the gods.

He’s not the one who’s stayed with Tubbo, though, while Tommy and Wilbur run off to do whatever. He’s not had the boy cry into his shoulder, whispering, _“He said Techno was on our side and I trusted him.”_ He’s not turned over an underfed wrist to reveal a slightly cracked communicator, filled with backlogs of lies from the people Tubbo admired most.

“You’re Wilbur’s brother, right?” she calls down to him.

Technoblade pauses for only a second before reaching back into the furnace and collecting more cooked food. “Yeah.”

“And Tommy’s?”

“Mhm.”

“So you’re their family?”

“I said that already.”

Niki huffs. “I just wanted to hear you admit to it.”

The chest he’s opening creaks loudly, but he just puts the food in and shuts it with a _thud._ He then turns towards her, eyes squinting a little as he looks up.

Niki stills her swinging legs and tenses, ready to leave should he make a sudden move, but he doesn’t reach for a weapon, so she takes the small opportunity to study him further.

She’s waiting for something. Not tears, that’d be too much to ask for, but shame, or remorse, some semblance of regret. Niki’s not sure why she’s searching for humanity in this person she doesn’t know, this person who killed someone she loves, but she figures it’s the same reason she tries to shut down Wilbur’s ramblings about Fundy being a traitor.

This world is not black-and-white, it’s so full of slight shades of grayscale that it makes her vision swim.

Technoblade’s expression is the same as ever, his drawl monotone and his brow stiff, but there’s a flicker of something behind his eyes, a snapping turtle’s soft underbelly, that keeps her from shouting at him as she’d somewhat intended to.

“Families aren't like this,” she tells him, finally.

The heaviness of his quiet sigh carries through their base, bouncing off the walls and settling like dirt on the unfinished floor right as he looks down at it.

Niki thinks about the last message from her family, a sweet thing full of well-wishes. She thinks about Tommy, desperate to stand eye-to-eye with Wilbur. She thinks about Wilbur, who promised Tubbo that Technoblade wouldn’t hurt him.

She thinks of all of them, and how the stable bridge between them is a murderer, a feral beast who kneeled at Schlatt’s feet.

“Family doesn't _do this,”_ Niki whispers.

“Mine does,” Technoblade replies.

* * *

“Your parents are together?” Wilbur had asked her, a little less than two years ago.

They’d been sitting on a dock that led out to the ocean; a small mark on the world, left behind by whoever had perused it before they’d arrived.

The two of them were tied by fate, as overdramatic as that sounds.

World-hoppers, like Niki had been at the time, are solo-travelers as a rule. Attachments are warned against, said to be like quicksand. Wait too long and you’ll be consumed by the very land you meant to conquer. 

With the amount of worlds created, the likelihood of happening across someone in your adventures was slim. It wasn’t impossible to enter an occupied world, but even then, the probability of actually running into whoever else was exploring was a mere sliver, and getting along with whoever you met was a whole nother layer of difficulty.

Wilbur was a rarity in all those ways, and more. He’d approached her with armor and an offering of a house she could stay at, looking beyond shocked when she accepted and followed him back to a rickety little hut, still under the very oak it was built from.

“I don’t usually do this,” he’d admitted, staring up at the ringlets of the tree.

“This?”

“World-travel. Surviving alone in the wilderness. Inviting people back to my place immediately. Any of it.”

Niki had laughed at him and he’d smiled back, the atmosphere immediately settling into something more comforting than the tentative peace they’d started with. “Why are you doing it then?”

“Ah,” he’d sighed and ran a hand through his hair, a memory caught in between his eyes and hers. “I figured it was time to try.”

There was clearly more to the story, but that was enough for Niki. She’d spent so long out on her own, with nothing but the growl of monsters and the ping of her communicator to keep her company, that she gulped down every word out of Wilbur’s mouth like water after a desert trek.

They stayed together for a lot longer than Niki had initially expected, the camaraderie only somewhat slighted by the gentlemanly acts he kept attempting, which Niki shied away from. They were surviving on raw meat and her hands bled from days in the mines; shoes were hardly the top of her list of concerns.

He was never invasive though, and conversation remained somewhere between pleasant and actually engaging, so she stayed and they continued further towards the future together.

They’d made it to the topic of their personal lives by the time they reached the little dock across the water. Niki had suggested they stop to take a break, the sun still high above them. Wilbur had agreed, but something about the topic had dampened his energy, so Niki had taken the lead.

“Together and happy,” she affirmed, answering his question. “It was just the three of us, now the two of them.”

He seemed interested beyond whatever minute details she’d offered, and she wasn’t quite sure _why,_ but there wasn’t much harm in glorified pleasantries so she humored him, inclining her head in a _“go on,”_ gesture. 

Wilbur tangled their legs together and settled back, his palms pressed to the wood and his eyes fixed on the skyline.

“Why’d you leave?”

“It was time.” Niki responded immediately, then laughed a little at the ominousness of her answer.

She tried to explain to him the crawling of her skin in that place, like last year’s winter-coat tugged too-snug over grown shoulders. 

Wilbur nodded as though he understood, and Niki wasn’t sure if it was honest, but it looked as though it was.

If nothing else, Wilbur seemed the sort to understand the value in chasing something you weren’t even sure if you’d ever reach. It takes a certain type of person, no matter how new, to enter a survival-oriented world, a wide expanse of next-to-nothing for as far as your legs could take you.

“My mom taught me how to bake,” she added, nudging him with her knee in an attempt to stop his expression from its inward curl. “I taught myself to fight.”

Something lit softly in his eyes at that and he turned to look at her. “I had to be taught, fighting was never my thing.”

Niki didn’t get it then, but she does now, all this time later. Watching Wilbur with a sword is like watching someone mimic Techno, lacking all of his ease and carrying all the tension of a man who’s polishing his skills out of paranoia.

His sword clashes with Tommy’s, his eyes stare blankly at something only he sees, and Niki exchanges a look with Tubbo before quietly hoping that they find more allies. 

Niki is not Atlas, but Wilbur isn’t either. He’s a foolish mortal; one who offered to aid in something bigger than he is, only to be crushed under the weight of the entire world.

* * *

The final battle comes in a whirlwind.

Fundy takes his crown and crosses the board, putting Schlatt, whom he’s decided is his true enemy, in check. He comes to Pogtopia bearing a spy journal and a renewed sense of determination that makes Niki grateful they can stand on the same side. He manages to hold onto it too, despite the open distrust he’s met with when he looks into his fathers’ eyes.

Every moment is cut through by the things they try to avoid, like the way Wilbur won’t carry anything other than a sword and the questions he tosses at Technoblade as if they’re having fun and not grappling with, as the man himself once put it, _“independence, or death.”_

Just before they gather together, Wilbur hands her armor more monetarily valuable than anything she’s ever held, along with a tuft of blue dye. 

“From Technoblade,” he tells her, eyes shifting so slightly she’s sure no one else will notice.

She knows he’s talking about the armor, and she wants to protect her friends more than she hates the man who forged it, so she puts it on and thanks him, handing him some bread in return. He says nothing about the ink, nothing about the circumstances, nothing about the _wrongness_ within him that they both know she’s seen. 

They stare at each other and his empty expression softens slightly into an echo of his old smile before he nods and walks back to Tommy.

Niki can’t help but hope the gesture is indicative of something other than the farewell it feels like.

Niki runs into the end of the war alongside Pogtopia and its allies; an entire army to her front and the memory of overhearing Wilbur tell Tommy, _“no one’s on our side,”_ at her back.

She’s not fighting for L’manberg anymore. It’s a piece of her past, home only to an abandoned bakery and memories of when her old uniform fit perfectly. She’s fighting for the people. For Wilbur and his family, who have brought her here and taken her in, as well as everyone else. The people who have made this place, for her, something much more than a respite in a longer journey.

The noises that come out of Schlatt as he crumbles, surrounded by her friends after Dream and Wilbur have met and discussed Manberg’s surrender, make her stomach turn.

Fundy shouts at the man as he goes, and she gets a fierce flare of satisfaction as she hears the spite in every syllable. Schlatt got so close to being everything the fox ever wanted before missing the mark by so much. She will mourn that part of him for Fundy, and nothing else.

The allies to their side are steadily getting more elated, but there’s apprehension in the closed circle of central Pogtopia. It doesn’t feel like the end quite yet and Niki doesn’t raise her voice to try and say something over the cheers for a fallen enemy, but as she locks eyes with Tommy and Tubbo, she hopes her expression conveys every thought she has.

_I’m proud of you. I’m worried. I want you to be careful, still._

They head towards the podium for the re-establishment of the true foundation of L’manberg. The presidency passes hands like a baton, Tommy wavering as he gives it up for what Niki knows will be his great adventure, Wilbur giving it up with a nod to Technoblade and a fire behind his eyes.

Niki recognizes it as someone entirely different than the person who first led her here.

The power passes again, but Niki’s more focused on the path Wilbur weaves through the crowd, the way he whispers that _he’ll be back_ before ducking out of the country’s borders and heading towards the direction of Pogtopia. 

She’s so fixated on watching the broken vessel of her friend go, debating if she should follow him or not, that she misses the second time Tubbo dies by Technoblade’s hands. 

She doesn’t miss the blip it brings up on her communicator though, or the information that _Phil,_ a name she’s been told of like legend, has entered their world.

He’s the head of the people she’s fallen in with. Wilbur, madness in his veins and a void in his heart, Technoblade, a killer with a moral code she’s sure she will never understand, and Tommy, a boy with nothing but vigor and a fierce loyalty to the people he thinks are on his side.

A faint rumble sweeps through the ground and Niki fleetingly wonders if Phil can fix what his family has started, or if it’s too late to even ask him to try.

* * *

Niki has never lived so far outside the ordinary. 

The place she’s called home since she arrived in this world- her first real home since she left her childhood behind- is a smoking crater in the ground.

It’s been destroyed by the very man who invited her here, who led her forward in their attempt at establishing it. He’s gone now. His father’s sword is embedded in his chest and he shows no sign of a respawn.

To be fair to Phil though, she knows Wilbur was lost long before his body went with him.

She’s also just watched his two brothers attempt to kill each other, one shouting at the other that to be a hero, he must meet a hero’s fate.

It’s a Greek tragedy of a thing, just inches away from herself, but she’s not entirely sure which person fits what role, who the protagonists or the antagonists are.

 _Family,_ she thinks, _must mean something a lot different to them._

At 19, she’s less of a soldier than she was before war. Much of her armor has been exchanged for aprons and the body that used to dodge arrows with ease is a little less spry than she’d like it to be.

She’s travelled across worlds for so long she’s used to running the same circle: chasing the horizon just as she escapes it. She bleeds red; her skin is cracked and dry in places and her eyes carry the memories that come with time, that of love and loss and the undefined areas in between.

Niki finds a stove in someone’s half-dilapidated house and spends two days gathering ingredients.

She makes pastries for everyone she can think of, from the clenched jaw of a country’s leader younger than she is ( _“You’ll do wonderful Tubbo, here.”_ ), to the still, porcelain smile of a man who has never been her enemy, but some would call the villain of the story ( _“Sapnap told me you’d like these the best, Dream. I hope he wasn’t lying.”)._

She offers croissants to her friends, cakes to her enemies, pies to strangers she’s only just met and probably will never know.

At the end of it she’s left with only a basket of cookies and a satchel containing the things she arrived with, or gained and felt were worth keeping, slung over her shoulder.

The sky is amber when Niki finds Fundy sat on a hill, his fur slightly matted and his eyes shut so tightly she can tell he’s not asleep. The grass is thick and lush under her feet so she kneels in front of him before tapping his shoulder lightly.

His eyes open and lock onto hers and his tail swishes and Niki smiles, the smile of someone who knows who she is; who knows, despite everything, what she was always meant to become.

“Do you want to run away with me?”

**Author's Note:**

> So a bit ago, Techno said the SBI family dynamics can't be canon, since it wouldn't make sense for him to be constantly screwing over his family.  
> I then saw a Tumblr post about how that's kind of weird logic, probably based in a positive mentality towards what family means. I was struck with inspiration for this sorta-alternate-universe where that's _is_ how the SBI family is, and Niki, who grew up in a fairly nuclear home, has to try and understand it.


End file.
